To quote Kurt Russel’s character Gabriel Cash in the 1989 movie “Tango and Cash”…. this is FUBAR. Big time.

Tropical storm Harvey is bearing down on the Texas valley, and it’s gaining strength every minute it spends traveling the gulf.

Right now, the storm is expected to dump 24 – 48 inches of rain over 3 days inland and winds are expected to hit 75 mph. Parts of the Texas coast are anticipating four feet of rain as the storm makes landfall.

According to NOAA, it looks like the Texas Valley might get a hurricane in the next five days.

Even though the storm is just a remnant of “Harvey” right now, NOAA expects it to gain strength once it passes the Peninsula. How long it stays in the gulf will make all the difference on how hard it hits.

If you are stuck live in the Texas valley, stock up at HEB or Costco or WalMart ASAP. Flashlights, batteries, tarps, groceries and water are going to vanish once the news outlets pick this up tomorrow night.

In semi-related news, I’m curious if this hurricane will get any press north of San Antonio once it manifests.

This one kicked my spider-sense into overdrive. An article on Government Executive (and mirrored on Federal Soup) says “The president of the Professional Services Council (PSC), which represents 400 services and information technology organizations that provide services to federal agencies, said contractors should now begin planning for a government shutdown.”

Um… what?

There have been six government shutdowns in the past 36 years. 1981 (one day), 1984 (one afternoon), 1986 (one afternoon), 1990 (two days over the Columbus day weekend), 1995-1996 (twenty seven days) and in 2013 (fifteen days). The majority of them were based on “concerns” between a divided executive and legislative branch (Republicans and Democrats on alternate sides of the coin) that were eventually resolved.

So why the early red flag over a government that currently has a majority party in control of the House, Senate and Executive office?

David Berteau, “who served for 14 years at the Defense Department before becoming president of the Professional Services Council… speculated Congress would likely pass some sort of spending bill to avoid a shutdown in October, but did not guess as to whether President Trump would sign it.”

Ah hah. In other words, all bets are off.

The PSC is already putting plans in motion for an October 2nd shutdown and urging that contractors “should also begin to think through questions such as how they will notify their employees of a stop work order, their ability to pay employees while not receiving government reimbursements, whether they will be able to enter a federal facility even if their work is slated to continue and what tasks will not continue once federal employees are furloughed.”

October second would be the day the doors close if the shutdown takes place this year. If you know someone that would be affected by another government shutdown, you might want to tell them the PSC is already sounding the alarm.

In the grand tradition of Russia, the trendy "Moscow Mule" drink that's served in a copper cup has a pretty good chance of poisoning you.

In a recent article on both The Washington Post and The Hill, a "Moscow Mule" is actually a fairly acidic drink, with a pH "well below 6.0". The "better call 911" part is that "copper should not come into contact with acidic foods with a pH below 6" because copper will leech into the drink (or food) it comes in contact with.

I’m that IT guy. No you can’t have Facebook at your work PC. No you can’t access the company Wi-Fi network with your personal device. No you can’t remote access the work servers from any PC you want to. No you can’t skip this month’s security training.

Know why I’m such a pain? Because one slip up on my part will bring the company crashing down.

Ask Mondelez, the snack maker that owns Oreos and Cadbury, what the cost of a successful cyber attack is. According to an article on Food Business News, it was an immediate $7.1 million loss, another $150 million in lost sales, and an ongoing “to be determined” repair cost.

According to Food Business News, “The malware affected a significant portion of the company’s global Windows-based applications and its sales, distribution and financial networks across the company.”

“Although the company believes it has now largely contained the disruption and restored a majority of its affected systems, the company anticipates additional work during the second half of 2017 as the company continues to recover and further enhance the security of its systems. For the second quarter, the company estimates that the malware incident had a negative impact of 2.3% on its net revenue growth and 2.4% on its organic revenue growth. The company also incurred incremental expenses of $7.1 million as a result of the incident.”

In a previous post, I mentioned McDonald’s used to give away epic promotional items when you visited their stores.

This was another one of their promotions. The Dallas Cowboys full-size roster poster from 1979.

The front…

..and the back.

Tom Landry was still the coach, Roger Staubach #12 was THE quarterback, and Tony Dorsett #33 was still on the team. Wikipedia has a summary of the 1979 season, but I do not remember anything about seeing the games from back then. I do vaguely remember the uproar when it was announced this was Staubach’s last season with the Cowboys.

The back of the poster should have been a standalone poster in its’ own right. It had detailed stats of the whole team with photos of their previous accomplishments, an “all-time” best chart by position played, and a special “ring of honor” near the center.

I don’t remember anything on how I originally got this poster, but I do remember it kept falling off my wall every year. I kept having to re-mount it, and used everything from putty to glue to duct tape. I had no idea back then how to mount a poster and keep it intact over time, and my lack of experience shows in the condition. I couldn’t get some of the tape off the back when I got it out of storage, and had to help guide this one through the poster scanner to get it through.

Even through this poster was in worse condition than the 1981 version I had, it still did very well rolled up in a cardboard tube in one of my Seward Trunks all these years.

Flickr only allows 300mb uploads, so this is a highly down-scaled version of the original 905mb TIFF scan.

Way back in another era, McDonald’s used to give away epic promotional items when you visited their stores.

Case in point – this Dallas Cowboys full-size roster poster from 1981.

The front…

..and the back.

Tom Landry was still the coach, Danny White #11, Gary Hogeboom #14 and Glenn Carano #18 were the quarterbacks / alternates, and Tony Dorsett #33 was still on the team. Wikipedia has a summary of the season, and I do remember watching the final game against the 49ers with my dad in our living room on the old TV set they had. Funny how a simple thing like this can bring back memories so easily.

The back of the poster had “autographs” of the whole team around their iconic helmet.

I don’t remember the exact details of how I originally got the poster, but I do remember that as soon as I got home, it went up on my wall right above my bed and stayed there even after I went off to college.

The poster did surprisingly well rolled up in a cardboard tube sitting sideways in one of my Seward Trunks all these years, but it took awhile for it to flatten out so I could scan it. I got lucky the tape I used to hang it up back then came right off and left very little residue.

After guiding it very slowly through a poster scanner at max resolution, and a little straightening in Photoshop, here we are.

Flickr only allows 300mb uploads, so this is a highly down-scaled version of the original 900mb TIFF scan.

If you like this one, just wait until you see the Dallas Cowboys roster poster I have from 1979.

In a very interesting news article on Technology Networks, scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine “have found that stem cells in the brain’s hypothalamus govern how fast aging occurs in the body.”

The article is a straightforward read on a potentially world-changing research project.

“Einstein researchers made the surprising finding that the hypothalamus also regulates aging throughout the body. Now, the scientists have pinpointed the cells in the hypothalamus that control aging: a tiny population of adult neural stem cells, which were known to be responsible for forming new brain neurons.”

“Researchers injected hypothalamic stem cells into the brains of middle-aged mice whose stem cells had been destroyed as well as into the brains of normal old mice. In both groups of animals, the treatment slowed or reversed various measures of aging.”

There’s still a very long way to go before this even becomes feasible for human trials, but the idea that we now know where the aging process is taking place in the brain and how to slightly reverse it is absolutely amazing.